Chapter 10
The clock showed eight p.m., but the darkness inside my room seemed to have swallowed the rest of the world hours before.
After the hell that happened on the auction stage that afternoon, I’d locked myself in my suite.
I ripped off the linen shirt and riding pants as if the fabric were on fire, throwing everything into a dark corner.
Those were the clothes I was wearing when I called Rosário a “pathetic mistake” and shattered the heart of the only woman I’d ever loved.
The ice-cold shower didn’t wash away the disgust I felt for my own skin.
Standing before the full-length mirror, I adjusted my collar and slipped on the dark Italian suit—custom-tailored—that my father had demanded for the evening reception.
Down below, the live country music, the clinking of crystal glasses, and the shrill laughter of the Pantanal elite sounded like ground glass inside my head. The party raged in the main hall, celebrating my signing of the merger contract and the sham engagement to Isadora Peixoto.
To the entire state, I was the crown prince who had finally bowed his head and accepted the mantle of Fazenda Falc?o.
To me, buttoning my jacket and walking toward the door to head downstairs, I was just a corpse in a tailored suit.
I left Isadora chatting with a group of Japanese investors and slipped out of the tents, escaping through the back door of the main house.
The Pantanal night air hit my face, cold and dense, but it wasn’t enough to wash away the disgust coating my skin.
The weight of the broken silver pendant, tucked deep in my pocket, was my only reminder that I’d once had a heart beating in my chest.
I walked to the garages, threw my jacket on the passenger seat of my pickup, loosened my tie with a sharp tug, and started the engine.
I didn’t have an exact destination. My sick, irrational instinct demanded only one thing: to see the tire marks from Rosário’s pickup on the dirt road.
I needed that physical proof. I needed to see the settled dust on the exit route to convince myself that the humiliation I’d put her through on stage had worked—that she was safe, driving toward the state highway, alive and untouchable by my father’s dirty hands.
I accelerated down the dark road that cut through the main winter pastures. The high beams tore through the darkness, illuminating dry grass and red gravel.
I passed the ten-kilometer mark. The ranch boundary was close.
That’s when I caught the twisted metallic gleam reflecting in the headlights.
I slammed on the brakes with such brutal force that the wheels locked, dragging the pickup’s tires across the packed earth until the vehicle jolted to a violent stop. My body was thrown against the seatbelt. The air rushed from my lungs.
I left the headlights on, opened the door, and jumped out.
The aroeira fence on the left side was completely shattered.
Four solid wooden posts had been ripped from the ground, the barbed wire broken and coiled like a dead spider web.
On the ground, the tire marks told a different story than a simple loss of control.
There were deep, crossed grooves—the clear trail of a light vehicle being violently forced off the road by the dual tires of a heavy pickup.
My legs turned to lead, and the blood froze in my veins.
I scrambled down the steep embankment, slipping on loose gravel and tall grass, tearing my palms on the dry branches of the low vegetation.
The white pickup with the veterinary council logo was down there, wedged against the thick trunk of a tree. The hood was smoking slightly, the acrid smell of radiator fluid and burnt rubber filling the cold night air. The vehicle’s side was caved in, marked by the impact of steel against steel.
“Rosário!” My shout echoed across the dark expanse of the plain, hoarse and desperate, tearing through the silence of the night.
No response.
I ran to the vehicle. The driver’s door wasn’t simply dented from the accident—it had been forced open from outside, wrenched inward with brutal force. I stuck my head through the shattered window, groping blindly in the darkness, feeling the seats and floor, searching for any sign of her body.
Empty…
I turned on my phone’s flashlight with fingers trembling uncontrollably and swept the cabin floor. The seatbelt was loose. There were no bloodstains on the seats, which meant she hadn’t suffered fatal injuries from the crash. She’d survived the impact and gotten out of the car.
I swept the flashlight beam across the churned earth outside the vehicle.
My heart stopped.
There were signs of a struggle. The dry earth was gouged by smaller boots scrambling for traction, mixed with heavy, deep footprints. In the middle of the dust, windshield glass shards reflected my phone’s light. I brought the beam closer and crouched down.
Rosário’s phone lay on the gravel. The screen was webbed with dozens of cracks, but not from the accident. The device had been crushed under a heavy boot sole, the metal casing driven into the dirt.
The boot print stamped in the red dust beside the phone wasn’t from a stranger. It was the military tread that Fazenda Falc?o’s head foreman wore every day.
Nicanor.
The air left me completely. I fell to my knees on the damp ravine floor, my hands sinking into the soft earth where her feet had fought just minutes before.
“The veterinarian already packed her bags. Clarindo told me she threw her bags in the council pickup and took the dirt road toward the highway. A very sensible decision on her part.”
Jurandir Falc?o's voice whispered in my mind, and my father's satisfied smile—swirling his whiskey glass in the office right after I signed that damn contract—took shape in the darkness.
The truth crashed down on my shoulders with the weight of a mountain.
The auction. Demanding I give that speech on stage. Jurandir's smile as he rushed the signatures on the power of attorney in the office. None of it was forgiveness. Let alone a truce.
My father hadn't spared me; he had distracted me.
Jurandir demanded I humiliate the only woman I'd ever loved, forced me to shred her soul over that microphone, making sure I was occupied, engaged, and trapped in the main house at the exact moment Nicanor intercepted Rosário's truck at the farm's exit.
I hadn't saved her. My submission had been the perfect smokescreen for Rosário's kidnapping.
I'd handed the life of the woman I loved on a silver platter to the worst monster in this state.
A scream tore through my throat.
It wasn't a cry of mourning. It was the terrifying howl of an animal whose entrails had just been ripped out in cold blood.
I pounded the earth with clenched fists, over and over, until my knuckles tore and hot blood mixed with the Pantanal dust. The physical pain was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared to the agony of imagining Nicanor's filthy hands grabbing her arms and dragging her into the darkness.
I grabbed her broken phone from the ground, squeezing the destroyed casing in my palm until the shattered glass cut my skin, and stood up.
The frightened boy, the compliant son who spent ten years bowing his head to the old guard's rules, died in that exact second on the edge of that ravine. The submissive, polished heir who feared his father's judgments and choked down threats to protect the herd no longer existed.
I wiped the blood from my hand on the side of my dress pants.
My labored breathing gave way to a slow, cold, mechanically deadly rhythm. The despair dried in my veins, transforming into a hatred so dense, so pure, so overwhelming that my vision seemed to sharpen in the dark.
I looked at the dirt road above me.
Jurandir Falc?o thought he could control me through fear, and to do it, he ripped my heart from my chest and carried it off to the marshes.
My father was about to discover that by killing the man I used to be, he'd just unleashed the worst beast the Pantanal had ever seen.
I was willing to burn every hectare of pasture, every head of cattle, every contract, and especially every damn drop of my own blood if that was the price to bring her back.
I climbed the ravine with steady steps. I got into my truck, slammed the door, and flicked on the headlights. The Falc?o empire was going to start burning tonight, and the first spark would come from the skull of the man who fathered me.